clips...

Four Corners Magazine, April/May 09

recent images...

Yosemite...

Havasu, Grand Canyon

Three Days in June… (Havasu Falls Backpack)

There is something oddly magical about being thrown together with a group of strangers, each attuned to one distant frequency. Our frequency was of course a resonance of unlikely life—water surging through an ancient and incredibly dusty, rocky inhospitable and impossibly parched region of the Southwest, a massive hydrologic scalpel slicing through the armor of earth.

Some of our party had traveled across the continent to be here, from the humid climes of Appalachia. Others of our group came from just a few hours distant over the nearly monochromatic landscape of ponderosa pine and scrubby juniper beyond the rim.

Approaching Supai, the native village just two miles from the cascades but eight from the treks beginning, is akin to transiting from one world to the another, and from one time to another. This surreal experience continues throughout the visit into the depths of the primordial canyon—a continual transiting from past to present, a split reality of ancient culture and technology mixed with 21st century modernity.

Such incredible forces at work—heat, water, wind, tectonics, gravity, time… mixed with a palpable serenity that happily infects. A welcome juxtaposition of visual and sensory experience, a pleasant and engaging opposition. Location must be paramount in the lives of many (all?), transitory as our locations and lives may be.

Three days in late June was enough to glimpse the magic of connection between people, cultures and landscape. Three days was enough to access parts of the cluttered self, to shed a bit of baggage and resonate with something timeless and beautiful. Just enough time to understand the necessity of reconnection, the ongoing need feel a part of something magical. –Bennett Barthelemy

Oz...

The Mount…
Mt. Arapiles was a good dose of reality…living in conditions that were not ideal. We first arrived in mid February to cool temps, great climbing and good people. After the first couple of weeks the weather turned ugly, heating up to 110 degrees temps with a wind that one of friends said, felt like someone was putting a hair dyer in your face. And HUMID. Nobody talks about how humid the Australian desert is!!!!! Bread rotted in a couple of days, veggies in one. The fire bans for multiple days at a time so we couldn’t cook food, not like anybody felt like eating much anyway.
We’re not complaining though, well maybe a little, but the reality is that we are so lucky to be traveling, doing what we love, with all the love and support of our family and friends.
It was a reality check in that traveling is never like you imagine, and some things just suck, but there are the treasures hidden in those times that are the most memorable. Hanging out with Luke (a crazy Oregonian electrician) and Alex (an even crazier Brit) on one of the first 100+ days drinking beer and playing scrabble at the pub. (We overheard the pub owners say, “there over there with a COMPUTER, playing SCRABBLE!!!!! To each is own, I guess”) Going to Aldi’s for the first time and discovering some of the first really cheap food we’ve seen the whole trip, listening to Volker, king of the Pines, philsosophize about life (he’d been living at the campground for 6 months when we arrived). The hitchhiking, route finding, RP (tiny brass wires to protect tiny cracks) epic’ing and climbing on rock that absolutely radiated heat. Hanging out learning not so nice Swedish phrases from Oscar and and Kalla…. All memorable times that will stay with us forever. D-

Yes, Arapiles is another vortex, kind of like the center of the universe in YO-semite…The Grampians, sadly only a day there, is also a magical spot. Tassie too and all the burly adventure there… Not a bad place to be stuck for a while. Nice to be tasting the chill of fall over the last couple of days after so many hot ones. Surreal to think that tonight we will be falling out of the fall and springing into the spring in the northern latitudes of the Mediterranean. Thanks to all the crazy souls for the good times in Oz, the genuine kindness of folks like Volker, Luke, Andy, Alex et all. All the best to them. B-